Have you ever wondered what was eating your network? Would you like to be able to check exactly which application was responsible for that sudden spike in outbound traffic? NetHogs might help. This neat little utility calls itself a “small ‘net top’ tool”, and that is exactly what it is. NetHogs groups bandwidth usage by PID so you can immediately see which application is responsible and take whatever action you deem appropriate.
Recommended.
(Oh, and if you want a nice graphical representation of the connections your PC is making whilst you are using it, I recommend you install etherape. It can be a highly educational (not to say scary) experience to leave etherape running whilst you fire up your browser. You will find that your PC is making HTTP connections all over the place. Now try leaving it running whilst you are not doing anything and watch what happens.)
3 comments
Nice find Mick! It’s packaged in Debian and Ubuntu which is handy.
I’ve also used tcptrack on our NFS server to work out which nodes on which cluster are hammering it when we see high load averages and try and track back to users. Was very handy when someone changed a configuration parameter in their WRF weather model which caused every process in a 32 CPU job busy loop on an error message.. They managed to sustain 800Mb/s writes!
Chris
Cheers. I’d not heard of tcptrack before – it’s a cool utility and I’ll add it to my toolbox.
I assume that you visited the user in question with a LART in hand.
Mick
Nah, no LART, he had no reason to believe that changing that parameter would cause WRF to go ballistic. Now, LART’ing the authors of dodgy scientific codes, on the other hard, that can have merit!
Why they all decide they need to invent their own configuration/build system is beyond me, especially when autotools work (well, much better than what they invent anyway)..
Grr… :-)